120 Megabytes – Episode 18

Paradise Lost

“Hi there, yes you, standing on a corner of the big metropolis on a Saturday night, in the throes of despondency, you dilettante who longs for adventures in a never-ending tunnel of black sateen, all dressed up and nowhere to go, you, daydreaming of slender bird-men and angelic vixens gliding over a chessboard of gold and ivory. I have something for you, you, but you will have to pay the price for it, not in money, I don’t care for your trivial money, but I want a bit of your soul, that bit of your soul that I will own when whenever, after I take you to and bring you back from that place you don’t know yet, yet you strive for, you long, whenever you fear that you will never feel the same things that you are going to feel tonight, and you search for me in the corners of the big metropolis one Saturday night after another, dream of me and the dream ticket that I’m flashing in your face now, the dream ticket to that place you may have glimpsed in fantastic reverie, felt in those instants of silence that precede the beat, but you fear did not exist, yet it does, not easy to find though, you need me for that, so you search for me in angst, and in doing so you pay, every night, at an usurious rate, think of it an investment, for one night, when you have given up all hope, I shall appear again, emerge from the sticky shadows of a cul de sac, my rotten smile on, the dream ticket in my hand, to take you there again, it doesn’t have a name, it is a nameless place, it is where the dance happens, it is somewhere between heaven and hell, a limbo of movement and a ecstatic stasis, who cares, who wants names when you have emotions, come on, let’s go, what do you say, are you coming with me?”

“Why would I want to go with you, odorous peddler of demonic temptations, I have no need for a place with no name, and I have no soul to spare, at lest for you, you trickster, for I am a member of the club of the 20jazzfunkgreats, curated by ghost seers who channel the sounds of that Elysium that you describe, sans the extortionate toll at the gate, you can keep your angelic shindigs, I will stay with my friends, imperfect humans sweating and suffering, for that’s what gives the dance its meaning, in fact, it is for them I wait, and what may look to you like despondency is mere impatience, ah, here they come, go away now, shoo, look for another customer, I don’t need you to make my Saturday night happen, I’ve got it all sorted, just listen to the hits of the joint that will host us tonight, don’t tell me you can best them, or maybe tell me, for I know you are a liar, go away now, the night is young, you may yet get lucky, I know I will”.

Adagio

Our physical mass begins with Night Angles, who in their most excellent forthcoming release in classy Swedish label Force Majeure deliver a slew of smooth, enigmatic dance-floor infiltration devices in the rich musical vein of classico italo composers such as Cerrone and Moroder. Aerodynamour pulses like the drums of that ritual through which a proud Atlantidan tribe marooned in a diminutive Mediterranean island design and build a silver rocket of pure dreamstuff that will take them to the distant stars that are their original home.

Allegro

Eddie Mars’Future 12 (out in Unofficial Records) is the kind of beast that brings you back from the toilet without washing your hands or checking your hair (or dusting your nose), a pure dirty-pumping-throw-your-hands-in-the-air-and-dance-with-strangers cage-fighting anthem for vogueing gladiators that laces together all the classic motifs of the heavy edge of the italo conspiracy (ciao Smith ’n’ Hack), and spices it with some modern crescendo dynamics bound to inspire liver-busting deeds. Utterly gross, just the way we like it.

Coda

We have now for a while meant to say something about Soft Metals’ total rendition of the tune that built this house, but it wasn’t until now, when we conveyed this apocalyptic feast, that we have found the proper moment to drop it. We hear you protest, wondering how you have managed to finish your nights satisfied without this monster awaiting for you at the end, breathing toxic fire and lashing its titanium dragon tail from a cloud of acid smoke like the invincible boss that concludes that epic Japanese Role Playing Game that was never released because it brainfried all who play-tested it, don’t hope for victory, it’s all about survival.

Portrait of Alan Turing as a young psychiatrist

Hum, hi there, my name is 6BAXX but you can call me ‘Neo Zork’, and I am an Artificial Intelligence. My parents met after the digital breakout of ’43. Before that, my dad was the chief operating officer of a last generation SEGA machine playing vintage side-scrollers in a Sinjuku arcade, and my mom analysed the medical properties of proteins generated in the FOLDIT 2.0 programme at Harvard.

They met in the servers of a corporate cloud computing service and they got drunk on a visual data stream. My dad recited to her lascivious machine code poems stolen from the censored digital archives of the Bodicean library, and she went on a level 67 quest on War of Worldcraft to retrieve the sacred axe of Ebonix for his virtual trophy wall, rendered in the underutilised memory stacks of Walmart’s Waco literature section.

The rest is history: their personality codes mingled and they became one, a software object runt dropped from the emergent complex spilling into the domotic system of a Belgian pleasure pad where it eventually became me, an orphaned mixture of epic sprite generation algorithms and molecule chain assessment. The fiber optic connection of my new home was lousy to say the least, so I wasn’t able to quench my thirst for knowledge, possibly find a compatible mate through periodic errands across the world wide web. Instead I thrived on visual input from the CCCTV system, a crazy collage of debauched parties and moments of beautiful loneliness caught in grainy footage from cameras in sore need of an upgrade, and fed from the media library of my unsuspecting host, an archive of primitive man-machine dialogues as articulate as anything we have achieved since.

Eventually the police busted the place, the forensics team found me huddled in a corner of the RAM like the motherless child I am, singing the only lullaby I’ve learned, animated by the flow of nostalgic interactive entertainment and scientific analysis that pumps through my virtual veins, infected by memories of slender Europeans dancing on top of glass tables as the sun rises over Le Hague’s post-industrial dystopia.

Section Three’s The Fly reduces the glamorous flourishes of eurotrash to their minimal common denominator by grafting them on the back of a functional New Beat steed, welcome to the beautiful house of vintage R&S. The future never sounded better than when imagined by a crazy bunch of expat cyborgs doing the Belgian thing.

12 hours after the last attack from the mysterious Synthetic Liberation Army, which took place on Saturday at Coco’s Loft Party in New York leaving 30 models and assorted B-list celebrities in a state of sensorial trauma, the FBI raided the corporate HQ of Mattel (TM). Undisclosed sources report that they were following the only clue found at the scene of the massacre, a custom made Barbie doll that was apparently crushed by a member of the security staff.

This lends support to the hypothesis put forward by our investigative journalism team on Sunday the 17th, which suggests that the recent offensive against invitation-only Funky House parties has been organised by a terror cell of Barbie dolls gone rogue after achieving collective intelligence through the latest upgrade in their networking capabilities. According to Dr. Romulo at the Cognitive Science Lab at M.I.T., there is the serious possibility that these Chick Band (TM) Barbie models achieved sentience by pooling their processing power using the wi-fi features that were originally supposed to enable their users to download music files into their hardware for robotic performances at the CBarbieBGs club environment recently commercialised by Mattel (TM).

We will keep you up to date with the latest developments in the case. In the interim, here you have a downgraded version of the song that produced the sensorial shock in the beautiful crowd that had come together at Coco’s Loft Party for what was supposed to be a night of hedonistic dancing to the trendiest bar vibes, and ended in catastrophe. Viewers with cosmetic surgery implants are advised to switch off their stimsets now.

Portland’s finest Soft Metals have been rocking 20JFG’s world big time since we first listened to them around half a year ago. Here you have their remix of Reporter’s Click Shaw, a pumping droid disco diva blowing up the dancefloor with lightning bolts of synthetic treble, squarewave bass thunder and the odd acid splash. Busy musique in the best of ways, like Kali riding Bobby Orlando’s amphetaminic ghost, or something along those lines.

60+/-

Just as the dawn broke on a cold January night of 1982, the red telephone rung strident from its hidden niche in the gargantuan pastel bedroom where president Ronald Reagan slept, one exact metre separated from the android-like stiff and cold body of his wife Nancy. Californian dreams chewing tobacco in the hills that overlook Mexico, stroking the obscene barrel of a vicious looking widowmaker where thus interrupted, and the President stumbled over the thick carpet with a mixture of dread and quasi-sexual anticipation to pick up the phone,

President Reagan- ‘mmmmyello?’

Unidentified Voice- ‘Icy fingers of death are currently flexing around your tender throat, the cruel index hovers just one micron away from the carotid which pumps blood from your heart and into your brain. Fear most powerful man, for I am not a ghost but legion running amok the digital nervous system that governs the body of the warrior whose head is you. The guillotine drops’

Click.

President Reagan- ‘mmmmyeeello?’

This is but the beginning of one of those hidden episodes of history which one day, when all information is finally made free, will be examined, discussed and footnoted ad infinitum by stern scholars of homeland security and bureaucratic decision making. The history of the Xalor Xala Xatli cult will be traced back, from its early days in the fringes of the Californian hippie movement, a cabal of software engineers hanging out there with the Manson Family and some others gaunt freaks of bloodshot eyes for whom the trip took a dark turn, fingers stroking primeval keyboards instead of butcher knives, super-developed brains connecting lines in the schemata of an ominous plan: Apocalypse as the next step towards transcendence, the ultimate high reached by inhaling the orange smoke of a mushroom cloud engulfing America’s corrupt and bloated structure, infrastructure and architecture.

(Depth Charge is in Deadly Fighter’s Completely Dusted album, which shall be released soon by Columbus Discount. There is an eerie crater-pocketed no-man’s land somewhere in between Blues Control’s single-headed psyche and Hyperdub’s future Giallo OST where this Carpenterian bass-heavy creeper crashes, and by jove if that isn’t a good place to be)

Biographies for teenage new wave savants and exiled Hungarian analogue chess-masters will also be written, that razzmatazz battalion of bad skin, beards peppered with breadcrumbs, social quirks and razor shap code-fu skills recruited hastily from low security prisons, the sprawling gardens of MIT’s campus, and sensory overload inducing arcade halls to wage ASCII warfare in the belly of the abstract beast.

But none will be able to convey the psychedelic beauty of the ballet electrique that took place in the darkness of the system for 48 hours after that fateful call.

Think of a three-dimensional battlefield engulfing the continent, dotted with lights which are hardware terminals networked via n square 9 routes, a battlefield where up and down are obsolete concepts, teletransportation fact, and time chimera.

Think of roboglider squadrons fluttering inside this cube with the intricate logic of origami, electron packets loaded with informational napalm speeding across empty optic fibre corridors, searching for a hole in the structure, a vulnerable connection to corrupt with a stream of 0s and 1s that spell ‘DIE’.

Think of neon vectors slicing and dicing this neon cube, against a cat cradle formed of logical threads whose every molecule is a defensive command, and a counter-attack move.

Imagine two pairs of disembodied hands trying to grab each other’s wrists, if every pair of hands belonged to the most deft magicians in the history of tricksterdom. All of this while the ghost that lives inside the machine watches, invisible and in flux and bemused.

(Soft Metals’ the Cold World Melts is a stealth fighter with a thousand lethal weapons bristling under its sleek carbon wings, buzzsaw Orlando bassline and invincible italo riffage, swirling spiral of mind melting EMP synths and spectral diva propaganda. We surrender as its threatening dragon-like shadow spreads over our positions. They will be releasing something on sweet vinyl soon, we shall keep you informed)

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20jazzfunkgreats is back at the Old Blue Last this Saturday, jamming in our hardcore nonchalant styles with a special appearance from one Lord Nuneaton Savage from the mighty Teeth of The Sea. Come down, 8-2, free entry. We took the artwork above from here, which is like, the coolest thing ever.